At Nuremberg with Göring: The Story of Dr Douglas Kelley and the Minds He Could Not Escape

Daniel Holland
23 hours ago
7 min read

Man holding a skull, overlay of Hermann Goering's mugshot, military background. Text: "At Nuremberg with Göring." Serious, historical theme.

When Douglas Kelley stepped through the iron gates of Nuremberg Prison in the autumn of 1945, the war was only months behind him but its shadows were everywhere. The stone corridors echoed with the residue of a defeated regime, and in the cells sat the men whose actions had reshaped the world with catastrophic consequences. Kelley, a 33 year old American psychiatrist, carried with him a leather briefcase filled with Rorschach inkblots and a belief that psychiatry could help decode the human mind at its darkest point.

The assignment was unprecedented. Never before had the psychological states of major war criminals been clinically examined as part of an international tribunal. Kelley understood the enormity of the moment. In his own notes he wrote that “we must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.” That idea, both hopeful and ominous, would frame everything he did over the next year.

He also told colleagues later that he had expected to confront raving lunatics, men whose criminality and cruelty had been born from obvious madness. Instead, what he found unsettled him more deeply than insanity ever could.

A Rising Star Before The Darkness

Douglas McGlashan Kelley was born in California in 1912 and grew up with a relentless intellectual drive. By the time he was in his thirties he held a medical degree from the University of California, had specialised in psychiatry and neurology, and had already contributed to research on brain chemistry. His colleagues admired his combination of scientific confidence and academic curiosity. He had no illusions about the limits of the human mind, yet he believed it could be measured, mapped and understood with precision.

When the United States Army began preparing for the war crimes trials that would follow the defeat of the Third Reich, they faced a question that may sound simple but was psychologically enormous. Were the architects of Nazi terror legally sane. Could they be held responsible in the fullest sense. Or had the madness of ideology spilled over into literal psychiatric illness.

Kelley seemed the ideal candidate. Brilliant, direct, meticulous, and supposedly free of strong ideological bias, he was asked to travel to Germany as the psychiatric examiner for the defendants.

He accepted immediately.

During the Nuremberg Trial, American guards maintain constant surveillance over the major Nazi war criminals in the prison attached to the Palace of Justice. Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945.

Into Nuremberg Prison

The prison was a cold, foreboding building attached to the Palace of Justice where the trials would unfold. Its cells held twenty two high ranking officials: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher, Karl Dönitz, Hans Frank and others whose signatures had stamped the policies that devastated Europe.

Kelley began with interviews, observation and psychological testing. He wanted to understand not simply what these men had done, but how they thought. One of his early diary entries captured his reaction perfectly. “They were not the raving maniacs I had expected to find. They were rational, intelligent, and frighteningly normal.”

This realisation set the tone for his entire mission. The more he examined them, the more the idea of evil as pathology seemed to fade. Instead he found conviction, self justification and an unsettling ability to rationalise atrocity.

Nazi defendants sitting in the dock during the Nuremberg Trials.

The Defendants As Kelley Saw Them

Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, offered Kelley one of his most disturbing early interviews. Ley rationalised the treatment of Jews with chilling casualness. He told Kelley that, had he been in charge, he would not have killed them, but would have denied them work and shelter, thus forcing them out naturally. “All the Jews in Germany would have quietly packed up and moved elsewhere. Is that not so.” Ley insisted again and again that he was not a murderer and reacted with fury when shown the indictment calling him a criminal.

Hess behaved erratically but Kelley believed the amnesia act was theatre, a manipulative attempt to control his narrative. Streicher displayed no remorse and no sophistication, but no psychosis either. Hans Frank, the Governor General of occupied Poland, unsettled Kelley in a different way. Frank spoke eloquently about art, music, philosophy and German culture. He prayed, he reflected, he confessed. Just before his execution he would tell the court that “a thousand years will pass and Germany’s guilt will not be erased.” It was one of the most haunting public acknowledgements of wrongdoing to emerge from the trials.

None of these men fit the mould of insanity. They were logical. They were articulate. They were, in Kelley’s words, “ordinary men with extraordinary power, shaped by culture and ambition, not by mental illness.”

The Complicated Case Of Hermann Göring

No relationship affected Kelley more than the one he developed with Hermann Göring. The former Reichsmarschall received him with warmth and theatrical charm. Kelley described how each morning Göring would rise from his cot, smile broadly, offer his hand and pat the place beside him as if inviting an old friend to sit.

Their conversations ranged across politics, philosophy and Germany’s future. Göring was intelligent, manipulative and charismatic, with an unwavering belief in his own legacy. He told Kelley directly, “Yes, I know I shall hang. You know I shall hang. I am ready. But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man.”

Perhaps the most famous conversation credited to Göring during the trials came not from Kelley but from psychologist Gustave Gilbert. The quote reflected perfectly the worldview Kelley sensed beneath Göring’s charm. “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy. It is always a simple matter to drag the people along.” When Gilbert asked how leaders do this, Göring replied, “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.”

This philosophy disturbed Kelley deeply because it captured the psychological mechanics he was beginning to see across the defendants: obedience, nationalism and the desire to follow strong authority.

When Kelley’s assignment ended in 1946, Göring wrote him a note thanking him for his humane behaviour and his attempt to understand their reasons. Kelley kept that letter for the rest of his life.

Kelley’s Conclusions And The Public Reaction

By the time his work at Nuremberg concluded, Kelley had reached a conclusion that would shock both the scientific community and the public. The Nazi leadership, he argued, did not suffer from psychosis, delusion or organic mental disease. Their behaviour had been shaped by ideology, culture, personality and opportunity, not by madness.

He believed they represented a specific type of authoritarian personality: nationalistic, hierarchical, obedient to strong leadership. But he warned that this potential existed elsewhere too. He wrote that the capacity for such crimes “could be duplicated in any country of the world today.”

People did not want to hear that.

Many preferred to believe that genocide emerged from mental abnormalities rather than through ordinary psychology. Kelley’s assessment dismantled the comfortable boundary between evil and normality and suggested that under the right pressures, ordinary individuals could commit extraordinary crimes.

Colleagues criticised him. Some claimed he had been manipulated by his subjects. Others believed he saw intelligence where he should have seen cruelty. His relationship with Gilbert deteriorated as the two men published contrasting interpretations.

But while society debated his conclusions, Kelley himself began to struggle with the psychological burden of everything he had witnessed.

The Weight Of Nuremberg

Back in the United States, Kelley accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley and continued researching and writing. But the experience had marked him. His son later described his father’s growing emotional volatility, saying that rage and depression began to shadow his life. Kelley drank heavily, obsessed over criminology, became fascinated by poisons and returned repeatedly to the question of how seemingly rational men had been capable of such horrors.

Cyanide in particular began to preoccupy him, the very substance Göring had used to evade the hangman. Kelley spoke about it openly, studied its effects and told colleagues that the method of Göring’s death had been, in his words, “a brilliant finishing touch to his own narrative.” To those who knew him, it sounded analytical. With hindsight, it was chilling.

The Final Collapse

On New Year’s Day 1958, Kelley was at home with his wife, children and father. While cooking he accidentally burned himself and flew into a rage. His son, Doug Kelley Jr, later explained that the emotional spiral happened rapidly. Moments later Kelley appeared on the staircase holding potassium cyanide. He shouted that he would swallow it and be dead within 30 seconds.

He did exactly that, collapsing in front of his family, dying from the same substance that Göring had taken twelve years earlier. He was only 45 years old.

Years later his son said, “I know it’s ironic. I think maybe he knew he was on a runaway train. I think he knew what was inside, but he didn’t know how to make it go away.”

The Unfinished Question

Douglas Kelley’s legacy remains divided. Some remember him as an innovative psychiatrist who confronted a unique historical moment with honesty and scientific courage. Others argue he allowed himself to be too sympathetic, too impressed by the intelligence of the men he examined.

Yet the question that drove him still stands. If the men who orchestrated one of history’s greatest atrocities were sane, rational and psychologically ordinary, then the nature of evil becomes something far harder to confine, diagnose or defend against.

Kelley walked into Nuremberg believing psychiatry could offer clarity. What he found instead were answers that blurred boundaries, challenged assumptions and followed him until the day he died. His work remains unsettling because it refuses to let us escape the uncomfortable truth he discovered: that monstrous deeds are not always born from monstrous minds, and that the psychology of evil is far closer to ordinary humanity than anyone wants to admit.